Mike Kwok, senior vice-president of Professional Services at provider of integrated software and services for facilities asset management, facilities capital planning, and capital spend management, VFA, discusses how healthcare organisations can more effectively plan and prioritise capital improvements, improve asset utilisation, and obtain much-needed funding.
While he draws substantially on the company’s experience with US healthcare facilities, there are many parallels, he says, in the lessons learned for estates and facilities managers and others responsible for running and maintaining such facilities in the UK.
Healthcare providers face many unique challenges in managing and maintaining facilities, from compliance with government regulations, to changing healthcare delivery needs. These challenges are made more difficult in the face of tightening budgets. Yet the condition of healthcare facilities can have a direct impact on both patient and staff satisfaction. Managing a portfolio of healthcare facilities, with multiple systems and varying levels of maintenance needs, is a complex task. As healthcare facilities’ capital spending needs increase, and budgets remain tight, so too does their need for well-grounded and defensible capital planning processes, in order for administrators to both garner needed funding, and intelligently manage the trade-offs that arise in making funding allocations to ensure that those investments support the organisation’s ultimate goals. Although the capital planning process in healthcare organisations parallels that of other industries in many ways, it also presents some special challenges.
Microcosms
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